Stare Decisis: The Republican Party's Radical Counter Revolution

Consider 3 things:

1/ Recent laws enacted in  Missouri, Alabama and other Confederate states to undo Roe v Wade and outlaw abortion

2/ The Republican victory in denying Obama his choice for a Supreme Court nominee, which resulted in a majority "Trump Court" committed to over turning Roe

3/ The 1.7% margin of victory in Doug Jones' victory for the US Senate seat in Alabama over Roy Jones who was banned from an Alabama shopping mall because it was evident he prowled the premises in a search (often successful) for teen age girls. 

Judge Moore was forgiven his pedophile proclivities because, outside the urban centers of Birmingham, Montgomery and Huntsville, citizens loved him for spurning the First Amendment's separation of church and state (with sculptures of the 10 Commandments placed in court houses) and his endorsement of the 2nd Amendment, which those citizens knew was going to be violated, someday, by agents of the federal government who would swoop out of the sky in black helicopters and blue helmets to seize the guns of law abiding citizens and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Arguments against "packing" the Supreme Court, voiced by otherwise liberal Democrats coalesce around the idea that the Court is a bastion of stability, an anchor to core principles, which abides over generations to protect the People and their Constitution against the vicissitudes of partisan struggle.

The Court, they argue, is neither Republican nor Democrat. There is no such thing, Chief Justice Roberts has said, as an "Obama justice" or a "Trump justice."

That, of course, is manifestly untrue. 

In fact, there is not only such a thing as  "a Trump justice" but there is such a thing as "Trump justice" and, for that matter, Southern justice.

In the most recent case, "Franchise Tax Board of California v Hyatt" Justice Thomas speaking for justices Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch has declared the principle of stare decisis obsolete and inoperable. Kaput. History. Which is to say, legal precedent, settled law means nothing now. If the current Court disagrees with Roe or with Brown vs Board of Education, well then, those decisions mean nothing.

So how much does the Court now represent continuity, stability, a focus on that guiding star of the Constitution?

Of course, the whole idea of the Supreme Court justices simply calling balls and strikes once the Congress has established the strike zone is ludicrous. Anyone with the most passing familiarity with Court decisions knows the justices regularly make up a new strike zone. 
In Dred Scott, the Court decided Negroes were property and had no "standing" to sue in court. Where did that strike zone come from?  In Brown, the Court decided "separate but equal" is an absurdity, as separate is invariably unequal when it comes to public schools. Where in the constitution did that come from? In Roe, the Court found a right to privacy in the Constitution, a word never mentioned but only "implied" there. 

It was always an absurdity to claim what was so obviously untrue: That the justices "just follow the law" rather than the passions of the moment. 
The justices follow their own individual passions, or as they call them, their principles, and they cherry pick excuses from the Constitution exactly as preachers find support for whatever they want to believe in the Bible. You can find support for subjugation of the Black race in the Bible (the stain of Cain), for murder, for rape, for incest.  The Good Book and the Constitution are shape changing, morphing phantasmagoria. 

But we need a Supreme Court when Congress is divided and cannot or will not, out of cowardice or intransigence, make a decision.

One way to fix this would be to simply admit the Court is the most political of our branches, a group which can make decisions without worrying about adjusting what they want to do by what they perceive the citizens desire.  Knowing that, allow the President at the beginning of each of his 4 year terms to appoint 2 new justices, so by the end of two terms, the President has shifted the Court toward a more liberal or a more conservative make up, reflecting the drift of the ideology of the electorate.

This requires no Constitutional amendment and sets no fixed number of justices (which the Constitution does not set) but allows it to float.

Packing the Court may be something like the Great Compromise of 1850, which postponed the inevitable conflict over slavery for 10 years.

But, ultimately, these United States may have to face a larger issue: The center no longer holds.

We thought we settled the issue of whether or not the United States could remain united with the Civil War, but, to Mad Dog at least, it now appears this was wishful thinking. 

What drove the states into conflict, of course, was slavery, and what slavery required was the belief that Whites rightfully should rule Blacks and that Negroes were not, as Justic Taney said in Dred Scott, actually fully human. The idea of subhumans who could be whipped, sold, destroyed at the whim and will of superior White human beings was the foundation of slavery then and it persists as the foundational belief in the South, or at least in the rural South and in all those rural parts of America which constitute the "Alabama in between" parts of America whether that is Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Missouri. 

And there are parts of the south, like the research triangle (Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh) where neurons connect in wonderful ways in mentating human beings who loathe the vicious racism they encounter daily. They even removed a statue of a confederate soldier in Chapel Hill. 

There are, of course, White folks living in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana who are horrified by the Ku Klux Klan, by the idea that blowing up a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama was a good thing because it killed 4 Black girls before they could breed. The juries which convicted the White Birmingham bombers 37 years later had Whites voting for conviction.

Of course, in 1963, when the bombings happened, no South Carolina jury would convict the White KKK bombers. No South Carolina jury would have had a single Black member.  Murderers of freedom riders in those days, obviously guilty, were routinely acquitted. 

Douglas Jones argues in his worthy "Bending Toward Justice" that the arc of history is long but it truly does bend toward justice. 

And reading about the low life conspiracy theorist men who blew up that church, and reading about the society which supported them, either tacitly or vocally, either directly or indirectly, you can hope their form of Southern was like the rabid dog, dangerous, lethal, but staggering toward its own demise.

But, after the exhilaration of the conviction and imprisonment, of the meting out of justice, Jones, who was the prosecutor in the convictions of those Birmingham bombers,  runs for Senator against Roy Moore, a frothing pedophile, a soul mate of Strom Thurmond (who fathered a child with a Black twelve year old) and Moore, the sweetheart of the KKK leads Jones until the find moments of the election, when Jones finally manages to win by 1.7% of the vote. 

Rural Alabama voted overwhelmingly for Moore.

What this suggests is we are not on an arc bending inexorably toward justice but it suggests that the demon seed of racism is passed on generation after generation and cannot be expunged, that the South, despite the presence of "decent" and tolerant Whites, despite enclaves in North Carolina and Georgia,  is too thoroughly infected to be cured of the sepsis which festers beneath.

Would it not make more sense to simply admit what has become obvious: We gave it a mighty try. We tried to stick it out, but a bad marriage is worse than no marriage.

Let us take the West Coast and marry it to New England and the Middle Atlantic states down to the Potomac.  Pennsylvania could go either way. 
Let us keep Minnesota and Illinois and maybe Colorado. Let us take New Mexico, and maybe Nevada. Let this become the New Union of America, non contiguous in geography, and not completely homogeneous in philosophy, but close enough. And let us wish the Confederate States of America all the best.

They can have their Confederacy which forbids abortion, segregates schools, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools, water fountains and toilets. They can exclude non white immigration and they can do away with courts and simply organize lynching mobs. They can establish a church and put up the 10 commandments in all state buildings. They can have football teams which support universities rather than the other way round. They will have excellent hospitals in Texas, Tennessee and North Carolina which will be Whites only. 

Sail on South Carolina. You will be unperturbed by unpleasant thoughts imposed by outsiders. 

In New York and Oregon and New Hampshire, we will argue and we will debate whether we really want a mix of government option and private health care and we'll try to figure out whether we want to ban capital punishment. We'll fight about how to provide day care and how to provide the best education for the best price. We'll struggle with infrastructure and how to meet the ravages of earthquakes, mudslides and fire in California and how to keep the East Coast from submerging into the rising seas. 

But, at least, at our core, we'll be family in the New Union of America. 

People will, no doubt, pack up their guns and move from the North Country of New Hampshire and find more amenable communities in Georgia and Mississippi.

The main coast for the New Confederacy will be the Gulf of Mexico. They can drill in it and pollute it all they want. 

But the New Union of America will still have New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  We ought to be able to eek out an existence.

Peace. 

The Trouble with Joe

Joe Biden spoke in Hampton today.
The line formed an hour before he was due and the place was packed.
Anticipation was high.
People really love Joe.
Of course, for most of them, that love has grown from afar. 
This was a place to see him, touch him, etc.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?460665-1/vice-president-joe-biden-makes-campaign-stop-hampshire

I began to allow myself to hope: It will be tough beating Trump, given the strong economy and the fierceness of his support. But talking to the people around me today, I heard as much genuine affection for Biden as you see at Trump rallies.

When I asked two guys in their 70's why they like him, they grinned and shrugged their shoulders and could not say exactly why: "I just like Joe."

He arrived and began his stump speech, talking about how we've lost a sense of decency and how his father told him a job was more than a paycheck, it was about dignity.

He had a lot of anecdotes about things his father said, about the dignity and ennobling aspect of work, which evoked warm burbling about the times some of us can remember when there was fellowship, pride and a sense of contribution in jobs, whether it was turning out automobiles, steel or even operations at hospitals. A time when you might work for GM or Dupont or General Electric for 30 years. 

He launched into a joke based on a cartoon from the New Yorker. He started describing the cartoon--Barack used to kid me about it-- about a man sitting in an interrogation room with a bag of money he had stolen and--did I tell you this was from the New Yorker?--and he is saying "How was I supposed to know he was the job creator?" Polite laughter. I think I got it: The man had expected if he stole money from a rich guy he would be forgiven but if the rich guy is seen as a job creator, that's a crime. But most of the audience seemed confused. Laughed politely.

The gag went so nowhere I actually Googled it. The cartoon, actually, is funny. But you have to be able to describe it properly. And Biden could not. But he uses it in his stump speech. And he has more handlers than O'Rourke, Delaney and Gillibrand combined. Has nobody talked to him?

He righted himself and I thought: Okay, he's going to be okay now. But then he seemed to lose track of what he was saying. He'd forget the subject from the first part of his sentence by the second part. He'd flub his lines.  "We used to want to be an example of power; now we ought to show power by example," became, "We used to want to be example power by showing power."

Or something. 

It got to where I was feeling: Can't we help this guy somehow?

Questions came next and it got ugly.  The usual audience member who started off with several paragraphs about the experience of having a husband who developed early Alzheimer's and what it did to her family and to herself and to her husband and to their friends. I have to admit, my mind wandered waiting for her to find a question in all this.

But finally she asked what Joe would do to solve the Alzheimer's problem.  Joe sallied off into a long voyage about curing cancer, which had taken one of his sons, and which he had talked to Barack Obama about and got appointed to a task force called "The Moon Shot" for cancer, based on the premise that if America could send a man to the moon and return him safely back to Earth, then, by golly, we ought to be able to solve the cancer problem. So Joe traveled all over the globe, talking to people to learn how to cure cancer. And doing this, he discovered "cancer" is not just one disease but 240 different diseases. (Where that number came from is still a mystery to me.) But all you really have to do is to get scientists sharing information, which they currently do not do.

So here is the rub: 1/ Politicians who believe they know enough about science to solve scientific problems.  2/ The question was about Alzheimer's. 

The audience could, it is true, think, "Oh, well, he means, like cancer, all Alzheimer's needs is for scientists to start sharing formation."

But when you get to the point where the audience has to finish your thought for you, because you've lost the thread, this is not good.

Physically, his skull shows temporal hollowing, and he has a sort of worn out, gaunt look. He's that neighbor who coached your kids' baseball team, who sold Christmas trees at the local fire department tree stand, who marched in the Fourth of July parade and everyone likes him.  

But you are making allowances for him because, well, he's lost a step or two but, well, Hell, you have to like the guy.

My neighbor, who saw him speak in 20012, observed:  "He's not the same man. He used to be quick." Today, he was a little at sea. 

Last polls put him up by 18 points on his nearest competitor in New Hampshire. 
What that may reflect, if that poll is not just sheer baloney, if it really represents voter sentiment, may be a longing for a return to normal. A restoration figure. Someone who is the opposite of the mean spirited, nasty and divisive Trump.

Joe is certainly a swing away from Trump. 

But if New Hampshire does its job, if it really vets the candidates, Joe will do so poorly here, he'll fall out of the race. Trouble is, even in New Hampshire, it's only the small minority who is even thinking about 2020 or the primary. 

Trump: His Living Gospel

"The psyche of the broad masses is accessible only to what is strong and uncompromising.
Like a woman whose inner sensibilities are not so much is under the sway of abstract reasoning but are always subject to the influence of a vague emotional longing for the strength that completes her being, and who would rather bow to the strong man than dominate the weakling."

Guess who wrote that?

You know it wasn't Donald Trump, because it has complete sentences and no internal repetition or digression. 
If Donald Trump had written it, it might go something like this:

"You know, I know you know, what we need. We really need it. It's not getting screwed. It's winning. We like winners, here. Not captives. Winners. Really. You know. People with the best words who don't get captured. So true.
Women like that  in a man. Especially if he's a celebrity. Women love me. So do Hispanics. Hispanics love me. Big time. Hispanic women love me especially. Miss Argentina could not keep her hands off me. They just love me. Hugely. 
And you know why? They like somebody they can't boss around. Somebody, really, who might just boss THEM around. Cause that's what women want, deep down. They do. They want winners. Not captives. They don't want to be captives.Well, maybe they do. I don't know. It's possible. But they want winners."

Or something like that.

But the Donald likely got that insight from somewhere. Hard to imagine him from drawing on life experience.

He keeps only one book on his bedside table. People say that. Just one book. Really, I saw it on Fox News. On the bedside table, next to his bed. Where he and Melania sleep. Well, where he sleeps. It's not clear the Secret Service trusts Melania to sleep with him.

Some people say she doesn't really like him that much. 
How they know that, I couldn't say. Despises him. Really. Can't see how anyone would know that. But people say that. They do. So sad. They do, though.

Where would he get that book, anyway?
Roy Cohn give it to him?
Or did he find it on his own?

It's pretty boring, really. The guy who wrote it did not even finish high school. He's, like, always explaining things most people learn in high school, as if it's some great insight he came up with himself: like people who are raised in poverty often are raised in dysfunctional families, because families need money and not having it makes them dysfunctional, and gross and mean and not very nice. 
It's the "Hillbilly Elegy" thing, only in 1923. Guys from the hood, or the hollow, just signifying.

Well, duh, Adolf. 
"Mein Kampf" is a little slow. I mean, you expect something more scintillating, actually, from the master of mayhem, but actually, pretty boring, sad to say, pretty pedestrian, or, as Hannah Arendt observed, "the banality of evil."



But, apparently, it speaks to Donald, who is nothing if not banal. 
He does have the best words, though. People say so.

The Why of Bernie Sanders

Thomas Edsall, the best New York Times columnist this side of Paul Krugman, ran an article on why Bernie Sanders scares people, and it boils down to the idea that most people in this country are not hurting and they do not want someone who might change things more than simply ejecting Donald Trump from office.

As always, reading the responses to his column is where the real juice arises.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/opinion/sanders-2020-trump.html

Yes, Bernie's past is disturbing for many, and for me, but he will be running against Trump. Talk about a past. Yes, the Republican hatchet men will run all day every day ads about that past, but the question is whether than can overcome the man we see before us today.

Dredging up Bernie's writing about how sexual guilt causes breast cancer, how he was evicted from his apartment and then siphoned off electricity using cable extensions, how he fathered his only child out of wedlock, how his "socialism" and "revolution" talk will scare off suburban housewives.

Edsall cites an economist/political guru=, Daron Aemoglu, of MIT who says, "social democracy did not achieve these things by taxing and redistributing a lot. It achieve them by having labor institutions protecting workers, encouraging job creation and encouraging high wages."  But there is no reason to think Sanders would not embrace this.

Another MIT economist notes, this election will not "turn on policy ideas, factual claims or even thinking of any substantive kind. American electoral politics has become purely expressive: how much do I identify with my candidate? How much do I hate yours? The balance of these competing forces seems to determine the winner."

As so many of those who responded to the article noted, and as the MIT economists noted, Bernie Sanders would be considered a moderate in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. That story could be told, if there were enough money to shout it.

The fact is, Hillary Clinton was not defeated because she was a bad candidate. I can say that as "fact" just as assuredly as anyone who denies it is not a fact because there are no facts, only "alternative facts." 

True, she was a poor candidate: she could never answer the most lethal criticism of her, that she was in the pocket of Wall Street. When asked about all those $250,000 speeches at Goldman Sachs, she looked like a deer in the headlights, as if she was never expecting that question. Never had an answer. And it killed her campaign.

Listening to Bernie Sanders on Alec Baldwins podcast this morning, "Here's the Thing," brought back the memory of the first time I ever heard Sanders speak, which was back in 2016, at the New Hampshire state Democratic convention. He was preceded by Hillary, who got the crowd to its feet and she was splendid. I was amazed how good she was before a large crowd. She walked on the stage to a tumultuous arena and looked around and beamed, "My heart is pounding!" she told the audience, as if to say, "I'm floored by this unexpected enthusiasm. I'm not worthy of it. But we can win this thing."

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bernie-sanders-thinks-democrats-are-still-way-course

Then came Bernie whose reception was also enthusiastic but he boomed out, "Are you ready for a REVOLUTION?" And the place went crazy. What he said got the crowd more and more frenzied. What he was arguing, obliquely, was that the Democratic party had failed to deliver for the underclass, for the guy who works three jobs and still gets evicted because he has to choose between paying the rent and buying the medications for his kids.

By the time he was finished, his simple, clear, emotion packed, irate message had reduced his audience to raw emotion. People were actually weeping with joy.

At dinner, a week later with my thirty something kids, they all said they could not support Bernie. None of them wanted a revolution. And he could never win anyway.

But, apparently, there were enough people out there who did want a revolution, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Ohio.

It was simply a question of which revolution we would choose.

The same is true this time around. Will the Democrats go with Joe Biden, who is simply a return to normalcy, who is the "Restoration" candidate or will they go for a revolution against the revolution of the Right?

Will those suburban housewives stay home if it's a choice between Trump and Bernie?  Will my own kids, who have jobs and lives which they don't want disrupted stay home because at least with Trump they have a great economy?

The question is: How much will outrage matter? 

Politically Correct Transgender Medicine

When I was in medical school, I was captivated by the work being done at my medical school where Julianne Imperato, a fellow in pediatric endocrinology, discovered a cohort of villagers in the Dominican Republic, where there was a lot of "consanguinity" i.e. interbreeding,  in some remote villages. This meant that genetic recessive traits could be expressed and diseases not seen commonly could occur more often.

In those days, medical students did exploratory rotations and a group of these students discovered a group of remote villages where mothers gave their children gender neutral names--the Spanish equivalent of "Pat" or "Chris"--because, as they explained to the students, the mothers were never sure which of the children who looked like girls at birth would "grow a penis at 12." 

Imperato McGinley sent the students back to the villages to draw blood on these "penis at 12" kids and they traced the family trees. (This was before genotyping could be done, back in 1970.) Her report was the first of five alpha reductase deficiency, a phenomenon which caused individuals who had female appearing external genitalia at birth but who "grew a penis" (the clitoris enlarged) at puberty, when the tidal wave of male hormone overwhelmed the blockage caused by an enzyme deficit.

Cornell, in those days, was a hotbed of "pseudohermaphrodism" research with Maria New, who was Imperato's mentor, and a steroid lab which was capable of analyzing which sex hormones were present in the blood of patients.

Now endocrinology, this science of biochemistry and hormones, has run aground on the rocky shoals of "transgender medicine."

The problem is, you cannot question the prevailing doctrine without running into both an emotional and political response and all dispassionate discussion is drowned by a tsunami  party line. If you question any aspect of "transgender medicine" as it is currently practiced, you are assailed as one of those people who denigrate, dismiss and degrade the patients, subject them to more suffering and abuse. 

Personally, I hope all physicians want to avoid making anyone feel badly about their sexual orientation, or gender identity, but, the fact is, "transgender medicine" and transgender clinics are now big business. Careers are being launched on transgender patients and their needs.

Paul McHugh is currently one of the disciples of the devil as his story is told in transgender circles, because he raised the issue of the meaning of suicide in this group. When he left Cornell as head of psychiatry to take the job of head of psych at Johns Hopkins, he was asked to take over the psychiatric part of their transgender program and he was alarmed to discover that 30% of the patients in this program committed suicide. He promptly stopped psychiatry's participation in the program.

And Hopkins was not an anomaly.  The suicide rates at virtually every transgender clinic, near as I can tell, stubbornly persists in this same range, even 30 years later, around 30%.

The transgender medicine folks shrug this off as the result of the hostility from society and from some unsympathetic medical people which weighs heavily on the transgender patients.

But one has to ask: If you were running a program for cardiovacular surgery or for joint replacement or for transplantation, or for any other medical problem, which suffered a 30% suicide (or death) rate, would you not stop this program? Would you not want to investigate and mitigate this startling finding?

The other things you have to ask about the doctors who care for these patients:
1. How can you recommend uterine transplants for male to female transgenders who want to give birth to babies? What is the risk of the mother's immunosuppressive drugs to the babies?
2. When you have a female to male transgender who wants to freeze eggs, how do you justify the risks of extraction and the expense of preservation?
3. When you have a  male to female transgender, how do you justify the expense of freezing sperm? And to whom would this new woman be donating this sperm? If it is to a lesbian mate, does that mean this new woman prefers the same women as she did prior to becoming a woman? 
4. When you have a male to female transgender who has not had castration who is in a relationship with a lesbian what sort of sex do they have?
5. When you have a female to male transgender who has not had surgery and has an intact uterus and ovaries and whose hormonal therapy has not suppressed ovulation and she asks for an IUD, what sort of sex is that individual having?
Presumably, vaginal sex. So this new male now is continuing to have sex as a female but function in some other ways as a male?
If that transgender individual who identifies as male is still having vaginal sex, what does that say about gender identification?
6. For a couple who has a male to female transgender in a relationship with a lesbian, is the risk and expense of IVF warranted?

Most of these questions concern the expense, the load to the system. Some have to do with unknown risks.
But mostly, these whole series of questions  suggests to me that transgender medicine is possibly being driven by something beyond compassion and that is spelled "m-o-n-e-y."
Is this a subspecialty or an industry?
The medical profession is often operating in the realm of making value judgments: 1. We do not abet opioid drug abuse except as a way of trying to change the behavior of the drug abuser.  2. We try to "treat" pedophiles, and prevent them from acting on their urges toward children who we perceive as inappropriate sexual partners. 3. As psychiatrists if we find ourselves treating people who are compulsive rapists or murderers we intervene to try to stop this behavior which we consider harmful to others. 4. When behavior is simply harmful to the patient, as in anorexia nervosa, we try to intervene even when the patient does not see her illness as a problem. We are often judgmental in medicine. But any whiff of "being judgmental" of "shaming" when it comes to dealings with transgenders is verboten. 

At a recent Endocrine Society meeting, one of the expert panelists mentioned that for female to male transgender patients he often uses testosterone doses in excess of what we would typically describe as androgen abuse in male patients, "gym rats" who simply want to have bigger and bigger muscles. For those male patients trying to build huge physiques, these doses of testosterone are seen as abuse. For the transgender patient the same doses are not "abuse" but  simply qualifies as allowing patients to achieve the gender identity they seek.

The big question here is: What have we wrought?
Secondarily, has the medical profession exerted the control over practice it should have done and if the medical profession as not exerted salutatory control, then who will?

The Problem of Ilhan Omar

The obvious problem for the Democrats of the Representative from Minneapolis is she offers Donald Trump and his co-conspirators the perfect boogey man: A Muslim who characterizes Israel as an apartheid state (alienating some American stalwart Jews who still support Israel out of an atavistic affection for the nation of Leon Uris) and she extends her remarks to attack American Jews whose money (Benjamins=$100 bills) support Israel and she questions their loyalty, because, after all, how can you support two countries and be loyal to either?

Part of the problem is she is not very bright and she is ignorant.
Part of the problem is she has not mastered English and is unaware of the resonance of certain phrases.

Bret Stephens, in a very convincing article, suggests she knows exactly what she is doing in her references to the moneyed Jews who conspire against America in the interests of "world Jewry," which must be based in Israel.

She is from a part of the world where people who regard Jews as a powerful enemy, who embrace an image of Jews as money obsessed, virulently self interested, do not even see that as Antisemitism. Now she finds herself in America where the resonances are different. 

(There is also something a little suspect in her own presentation of her life story: She portrays Arlington, Virginia as a place where she suffered taunting as a Muslim, and this may be true, but that place is one of the most diverse spots in the nation, perhaps second only to Queens, N.Y.. If there is any place to be an immigrant, that has got to be it. It is Ellis Island on the Potomac.
The Wilson Center describes it thusly:
Arlington, in other words, is at the forefront of demographic processes which are changing the face of American communities as well as the United States in its entirety.  Arlington is doing so with relatively little rancor as well as with improving economic opportunities and advancements, achieving low crime rates and far-reaching transportation opportunities. Arlington, in other words, reveals how an “inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” city looks.

So Omar's description of her having overcome the bullying of life in a parochial Southern city may be overwrought.)

But I digress: The fact is, Omar has criticized Israeli Jews, American Jews, not because they are Jewish but because of what she says they have done in terms of buying Congress and turning Congress into an "Israel occupied territory."

But the fact is, she has also attacked Saudi Arabia for its depredations in Yemen and she has attacked Egypt, Syria and other Arab nations, saying they are every bit as vile as Iran. So she's sort of an equal opportunity agitator.

Why do I say she is not very bright? Because that description Trump seized upon, while it may emanate from a simple deficit in English vocabulary and training, it was also an invitation to misinterpretation. Part of intelligent speaking is clarity and bullet proofing. "Something happened on September eleventh," did in fact stand as a dismissive remark, "Oh, the L train was late on September eleventh."  No, there are some events you cannot describe without clearly stating where you stand on the issue. No Japanese ambassador to the United States would ever say, "Oh, something happened on December 7, 1941."

And tying misdeeds of Jews to money is a pretty ripe trope. For whatever reasons, every anti Semite always suggests Jews are powerful because they are rich and control the flow of money. If she did not understand that, maybe she is just ignorant, which is bad, but if she did know that then she's worse.

The dual loyalty thing is trickier. This really is a problem. Of course, the laws have changed so Americans can now hold dual citizenship. When I was growing up you had to give up every other citizenship once you became an American citizen. Few people seem to worry about the woman who has Norwegian and American citizenship or even British and American passports. But those countries rarely have policies which bring them into conflict with America.

Israel, with its rightward move to Netanyahu, with its ongoing push into lands claimed by Palestinians has, in fact, looked like the bully, even though the Israelis are vastly outnumbered by their mostly hostile neighbors. And Israel has a fundamental, structural problem, as far as I can understand it: Either it is a Jewish state and that means that it cannot allow the majority of people living within its borders (Arabs) to have full political power or it is not, in which case, the Knesset could become a truly representative legislature and vote the Jews out of power. Israelis I have known are as horrified by Orthodox Jews as they are by Palestinians, but they do not go so far as to say Israel should not be a Jewish state. These secular Jews nevertheless cannot accept Israel as an open democracy in which the possibility exists, someday, if demographics go that way, Israel will be just another Arab state in the Middle East. 

And what does it mean to be a "Jewish state"?  I'm not sure. But I assume it means Jews have privileges not granted to others, namely Palestinians, who live as their neighbors. In that sense, Israel is some flavor of theocracy. But you can say the same of England, with its official Church of England or Italy with its Catholic Church. 

Now, I say all this knowing I do not really know what I'm talking about. I do not know enough about Israel and its laws, demography and politics. But neither do most of my fellow Americans. We know we like Israel because they are the only democracy in the Middle East, and they are basically Europeans--at least they look and sound like Europeans even if they resent that perception. We know Israel has actual free elections and we know Israel does not require women to be accompanied by a male in public, holds no public beheadings, allows women to drive, vote, serve in the legislature. Israels, in short, don't offend us with their religious based beliefs. 

No matter how you slice it, Omar has been a gift wrapped present to Trump running in the Rust belt and she poisons the Democratic party, which was oh so weak kneed to jettison Al Franken for horsing around, but when Omar rattles the anti Semitic cage, well, the Dems have to be very understanding.

Fact is, there are way more white, male Rust belt voters than Muslim voters.
That's simple democracy.

New Hampshire Apple Orchard Scam

When you think about "the system is rigged" you get angry, but that whole thing is just a vague idea until somebody does some digging.

Listening to Michael Lewis's podcast "Breaking the Rules" he details the sleazy way companies have ruined the lives of teachers, cops and firemen by acting as their "student loan managers" and managing to deny the former students the Congressionally enacted program which allows their student loans to be zeroed out after 10 years of faithful payments. When this happens, the companies managing their accounts lose customers and so they do everything in their power to keep the former students on the hook.

That's a pretty obvious scam.

But lately I was reminded of another sort of less personal but still sketchy scam involving apple orchards.

The richest man I personally know, a guy I knew from high school when I didn't know how rich his family was, now lives in New Hampshire and he invited me up to his apple picking fete one autumn. He lives on a ten acre compound bordered by a creek which feeds into a river and he's devoted maybe half an acre to apple trees and he invites friends up to pick the apples, drink apple cider and he cooks hamburgers on his Weber. 

"This is a great party," I said. "Much better than just a dinner party."
"Well," he said, "Of course there's a financial angle to it."
"Oh, did I miss the admission tickets?"

No, he explained, if he keeps a certain number of apple trees, or a certain acreage in apples, he gets a tax break on his property taxes, which are then cut because his land is in "agricultural use." 

I hadn't thought about it again until I took my bike ride yesterday and coming down Old Stage  Road in Hampton Falls I noticed the big McMansions on Avery Ridge Road had apple trees. Riding up the road, it was remarkable nearly every single manse was flanked by apple trees. At the summit of the ridge I looked over toward that huge chateau with the windmill and the Buddha statues out front, and apple trees lined up from the ridge on down.  All these rich folks with their huge chateaus were apparently apple fanciers.

And I thought, these guys are gaming the system.
Now, I haven't seen the tax returns of any of the folks who own these McMansions on Avery Ridge Road, but I do find it curious they all seem to have apple orchards.